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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#161

Post by SanjayMehta »

crdrost wrote: post #11
SanjayMehta wrote: post #7

I used to but driver support for wireless devices was so inconsistent I had to move to Linux.

That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)

It is hilarious. When I installed SLS 1.0 I had to assemble the machine to match the drivers available. 92 or 93. I vaguely remember I needed a SCSI hard disk.

Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi.

First wifi device I used was a PCMCIA card from Lucent, claimed 2mbps speeds. Still have it somewhere. I don't think I ever got Linux or BSD to work.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#162

Post by adiabatichottub »

gerdesj wrote: post #148
adiabatichottub wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc. Same. We've got qmail config files with 2006 as the mtime

"with no downtime and no rebooting" So, no patching. I used to boast about my NetWare server uptimes but that is so noughties 8)

Well, my experience on the stable release branches is that there aren't all that many kernel updates, so if you keep your services patched then you really only need to reboot about every 6 months.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#163

Post by massysett »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #49

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just i…

What kind of Brother laser printer is this? If it’s Postscript or PCL or AirPrint you don’t need drivers.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#164

Post by AdieuToLogic »

joshstrange wrote: post #128
zenoprax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it…

Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu). Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparentl…

> I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD.

Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources:

  FreeBSD Handbook[0]
  FreeBSD Porter's Handbook[1]
  FreeBSD Developers' Handbook[2]
  The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System[3]
Not to mention that the FreeBSD man pages are quite complete. Granted, I am biased as I have used FreeBSD in various efforts for quite some time and am a fan of it. Still and all, the project's documentation is a gold standard IMHO.

0 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/

1 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/porters-handbook/

2 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/

3 - https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Design_and_Implemen...

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#165

Post by gzread »

krylon wrote: post #96
shrubble wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the reports I have read.

Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT. The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.

> Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT.

I heard the developer got sidetracked into writing himself an AI girlfriend. (Not sarcasm)

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#166

Post by gzread »

toast0 wrote: post #66
throwaway27448 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)

Debian has an installation guide[1]. I'd imagine all the major distributions do. But it probably has to change a lot for every major release, because so many things change. FreeBSD major releases have changes too, but a lot of the user interfaces are very stable and so the documentation can be too. Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, as well as developing q…

I wonder if this is a curse of popularity. Presumably the documentation is stable and good because the software is also stable, and well-specified with one way to do each thing rather than five competing projects.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#167

Post by throwaway27448 »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #56
MarkusWandel wrote: post #49

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just i…

> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).

Ironically windows still ships without basic functionality

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#168

Post by adiabatichottub »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #151
sidkshatriya wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).

Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc. I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not a…

Stock FreeBSD is about 1.5GB. If you really strip it down to a barebones OS it's about 300MB.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#169

Post by 7F902DDA »

hedora wrote: post #140
gosukiwi wrote: post #57

When I tried FreeBSD, I was also blown away by the manual, so simple, such high-quality documentation. I think what I liked the most is that it felt coherent, unlike modern OS like Linux and Windows. I think macOS might be the most cohesive of the popular OS's.

I recently spent 20 minutes reading forum posts and vague documentation because MacOS couldn’t confirm a .md file wasn’t free of malware. I could say some nice things about MacOS, but it certainly is not “cohesive” any more.

> MacOS couldn’t confirm a .md file wasn’t free of malware

That sounds like a hilarious story. What was going on?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#170

Post by rootnod3 »

liendolucas wrote: post #138
krylon wrote: post #18

My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is t…

FreeBSD is an amazing beast. I'm currently using it as my workstation, and because I need to use Linux, bhyve came to the rescue and is easy to use it through the `vm` wrapper tool. It works like a charm and it is built in. Being that said, on FreeBSD 15, I believe I've found a serious bug: when I disconnect a USB optical mouse on the "Lenovo 16 G7 ARP" the system completes freezes and reboots, I guess it reaches a k…

Instead of the forums, report it also here https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/
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